The Internet network, commonly called the Web, is now reached by enterprises and commercial companies which are increasingly using it to perform business because it is fast and inexpensive.
Today, there are two types of business which are performed using the Web. The Business to Customer (B2C) allows a company to promote and market its products to individual consumers. Here we find all e-commerce sites, constituted of a Web site coupled to a catalog of goods, and of an e-commerce application allowing consumers to browse the catalog, select items and manage a virtual shopping cart, and eventually pay for the content of their shopping cart, which will be delivered off-line by regular mail services. A typical e-Commerce application is the IBM Websphere Commerce product, but many other products with similar functions are available from other software vendors.
The other kind of business, the Business to Business (B2B) allows companies to trade together. Typical B2B applications are e-Procurement and Supply Chain Management where a company selects and orders materials from suppliers, e-Collaboration where two partner companies cooperate to elaborate products, and Electronic Marketplaces, where several companies playing the roles of customers and suppliers perform trading operations such as RFQs (requests for proposals), auctions and reverse auctions, and contract management. E-Marketplaces are generally architected around a central catalog, as in the IBM Websphere Commerce Business Edition product, but other models exist where customers directly access the supplier's catalog through the e-Marketplace, which only handles transactions.
As the goods referenced in a catalog are generally not produced by the company operating the Electronic marketplace or e-commerce site and the descriptions of these goods including their prices usually come from applications run by the suppliers, there is a general or central catalog which is built at the marketplace site by aggregating the individual catalog from the various suppliers. However, the transfer of these catalogs from the suppliers to the general catalog in a efficient, secure and reliable manner is a critical problem.
The servers used today for B2B communication are known as B2B gateways such as the IBM partner agreement manager product, the IBM crossworld trading partner interchange product or equivalent products from other companies. As catalogs contain generally thousands of references, include descriptions, specification documents and images, they can be very large files of several hundreds of megabytes. The transfer of such large files through usual B2B gateways is inappropriate because these gateways have been designed to handle short exchanges of standard e-business messages requiring only validation and routing, and have relatively low performances in terms of transfer rate and capability of transporting large files of data.